Video: Configuring panels and palettes

Painter has always had a lot of palettes, which is really necessary for an expressive application that offers a high degree of fine-tuning. To tame all of these expressive controls, Painter 12 has adopted a popular Photoshop style tabbed palette paradigm. Let's take a look. So the new unit of the interface, if we move this out here by clicking and dragging, this is called a panel and if you're familiar with Photoshop and other Adobe applications, then this is nothing new.

Join John Derry, one of the original Corel Painter authors, as he shares the creative techniques that will get beginners up and running, and shows old hands the new features that can get a creative vision out of your head and on to your canvas. The course demonstrates how to create projects, use Painter brushes and painting styles, build templates, and work with layers and channels. John also shares pointers on setting up a Wacom tablet to interface with Painter.

Topics include:

Exploring the changes in the Painter 12 interface

Customizing brushes and selecting painting styles

Laying out the optimal workspace

Controlling color with the color palettes

Adjusting brush size and stroke attributes

Working with texture-aware media

Quick cloning with the Clone Source panel

Auto-Painting with the Underpainting, Smart Stroke, and Restoration palettes

Configuring panels and palettes

Painter has always had a lot of palettes, which is really necessary for anexpressive application that offers a high degree of fine-tuning.To tame all of these expressive controls, Painter 12 has adopted a popularPhotoshop style tabbed palette paradigm. Let's take a look.So the new unit of the interface, if we move this out here by clicking anddragging, this is called a panel and if you're familiar with Photoshop and otherAdobe applications, then this is nothing new.

But what used to be basically a palette in Painter is now a panel.And just by clicking and dragging I can take this, and you'll see that littleblue indicator, that tells me exactly where I'm going to put it.So I can precisely locate these where I want them.In this case, I actually want to put this right there.And when you have an aggregated set of these panels, as we do here, this isnow called a palette.You can take these and move them around as you saw me do a little bit here.

So if I want to take this and move it up here, I can, and what this does isoffer a very nice degree of flexibility in being able to organize these the way that you want.For example, there is another palette right down here, the Clone Source palette,which we will talk about in detail later, but I am just going to open it up andI have found that I kind of like it right next to my layers and channels.So I am going to put it in there, and that's yet another addition to the panelsthat I now have on screen.

You can also drag the edges of these, so if you want to open these up and makethem wider, you can.Another nice little addition are these little dots that you see at thebottom of some of these palettes.If you click and drag, you can scale the size of the panel up and down to fitinto the required amount of interface space that you have.Now one thing I talked a little bit about before, that's something that's in hereis, you can get into a situation where you have more palettes than actually fiton the screen, and if I, for example, just place one more palette in here.

Let's just take these and we will put this up here.I just want to get into a situation where you can see, what's going to happen isyou are going to into this set of panels going off of the screen, and there'sreally no current solution that I know of for this issue.So you are going to be forced to have to double-click on a tab in order toreduce this total length of your palette, so that you can get to one of these.One of the other things you could do is, you could start to set theseside-by-side, but then you are going to get into the situation that I reallytry to stay away from and that is eating up more and more of my screen realestate for the user interface and having less space for what the real task is, which is painting.

Now there are a couple quick solutions to this.One is using the Tab key, if you hit the Tab key, that will completely turn offeverything, except your painting area.The other thing you can do is, if you hold the Shift and then press Tab key,that will just eliminate your palettes, but not the Tool palette and the rest of the interface.So that's another way to pair down the amount of screen real estate actuallybeing used for the UI itself.Painter 12's adoption of a tabbed interface offers a comforting familiarity toanyone that uses Adobe applications.

The ability to easily adjust an individual panel's height also helps the usermanage the amount of screen real estate being taken up by the interface.

Q: When I double-click the John's Smart Brushes.brushcategory file as shown in the Chapter 8 movie "Understanding the Underpainting palette," the brushes do not install. Instead I get the message "There is no application set to open this document."

A: This is because your operating system does not recognize the .brushcategory file type. This can be circumvented by selecting the file, right-clicking, and choosing "Open With…".

If Painter 12 is not in the list, use "Other…" to locate and select Painter 12.

The file will be read by Painter and the brush category will be installed.

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